


You are in love

by saintsrow2



Category: Hotline Miami (Video Games)
Genre: M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, one-sided
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 04:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsrow2/pseuds/saintsrow2
Summary: Shards of story from across the relationship of two men who always knew how things were going to end.





	You are in love

**Author's Note:**

> As terrible as this is to say on something I'm posting on a public website to be read by anyone, I did really write this for myself. It just felt like something I had to get out of my system. I apologise if it's nigh-incomprehensible, but in my defence, that feels like the way Hotline Miami was always meant to be.

You are being carried out of a building that is collapsing around you, the sound of it falling apart reverberating through the shattered fragments of your skull. You cannot tell if the lights in the tunnel are flashing a deep death-filled red or if your eyes are too filled with blood to see anything but scarlet. He is carrying you out, arm around your shoulder. Without him you would not be able to make it out; without you, he could escape easily. He is risking his life to take you with him, but you know, clearer than you are aware of anything else in the rapidly crumbling world around you, that he has not even considered leaving you behind.

Everything comes and goes in snatches of sound and darkness, the feeling of his arm around you, the weight of your head as it sags on your shoulders, the sweat and blood that have soaked your clothes. You are inside your body and outside of it; part of you is somewhere else, a calmer place, where he still has his arm around you, but you are both not drenched in your own death. Both parts of you know that this place has never existed outside of fragments of time.

Ahead of you is a white and blinding light, the hope of freedom, a release from the dark world that the two of you have been travelling through. You are afraid, but calm, too. There is nothing you can do to stop this from coming, and you do not fight it. You do not consider if you want to live or die; it is out of your hands. He carries you onwards as the seconds drip away from the time you have left. It is all over, it was always going to end. One way or another.

You come through the doorway into a light so bright that you cannot see, and he releases you into the beyond. 

* * *

 You are lying on the beach. The sea in front of you is blue, rolling onwards not forever, but back to the mainland that you used to live on, before you gave your life to something more important. You have heard of beaches with black sand, but this one is golden, and the sea is lurid turquoise. It makes you think of tacky jewellery. You light your fifth cigarette of the day.

Most of your time is spent entrenched in warfare, but now you could be on vacation. Waves crash on the rocks further down the sand, sea birds circling somewhere far away cry their lonely pleas. Nothing is normal here, but the four men in your unit have scraped together a kind of new normality, a routine that brings stability to this chaotic world. There used to be more of you, but now there is four, and the commander, and you pretend that this is how it has always been.

Daniels and Barnes are sitting at a table a few feet away from you, playing cards and bickering in the way they always do. They fight always, but you understand the love in it. You have never had that kind of closeness yourself, but you see the affection in their rivalry. Like brothers, or what you believe brothers should be like. Their fighting has never bothered you, it is part of the new normality; their voices grumbling somewhere behind your shoulder as the ocean roars and somewhere in the far distance, gunfire rings out across the island so it becomes backdrop. You love them too, for being part of your living world.

There is crunching as boots walk across the sand and when you open your eyes, he is standing by your side. You look up at him, sun haloed around his head, red hair glowing in the light. He smiles at you, then looks out across the ocean, a hand held over his glasses to shade his eyes from the brilliance of the sun. He had a mission, but he returned. He always returns, your fearless lieutenant. Even as he says nothing, the calmness of his presence next to you quiets the last loud piece in your brain. You feel like you could lie here and sleep forever, in the heat of the sun with the lieutenant by your side. 

* * *

 You wake up in your apartment. It has been raining for two days – that or this has all been the same day and you have only slept for minutes at a time. You can believe either. You had dreams but they’re nothing more than bursts of colour and feelings you can’t remember ever having splashed across your mind. Your body feels heavy as you lift yourself out of bed; it is an enormous effort to drag yourself across the bedroom to the door, even more to turn the handle.

You lost your last job for never turning up to the shifts on time. You have never been good at keeping time. Sometimes you would turn up two hours late, sometimes on days when you weren’t working at all. You are grappling with your own life like a man trying to get a better hold on the loose soil as he slides backwards off a cliff. There has been mail on the doormat for weeks. It is the first time you have made the effort to pick it up. Most of it is junk mail. You have a flier. The flier knows you are a veteran.

Your last girlfriend told you she was leaving because she felt like you forgot she was a person. You don’t really know what that means. You are not good at keeping girlfriends. The flier knows you are filled with hate. It asks if you are afraid, for your country, for yourself. You know you are afraid for something, but you don’t think it’s yourself. 

* * *

 You are kneeling on the ground of a closet. He is leaning with his back against the door to stop anyone from opening it. You have his cock in your mouth, he has his hand on your head. He isn’t pulling your hair – though he could, he could do anything to you if he wanted to – but just touching you, cradling your skull in his hand. There really is nothing like the reassurance of feeling someone’s body on your own and remembering that you are not the only person alive in the world.

He remarks that it’s always nice to have something in your mouth other than the taste of blood. You slap his leg hard enough for it to sting and he tries not to laugh, hand over mouth.

You have had sex a couple of times, but it’s hard to find snatches of time when there is not the risk of someone finding you. Mostly it has been in the showers at night, when the rest of the unit is asleep, your bodies wet and cramped in the small space, entangled in each other. You wish there was somewhere you could be together without the fear of the others walking in on you, but you are also aware that this would not be happening if you were not in this place. Your relationship – whatever you want to call it – only exists within the framework of your new normality.

Part of you knows – and you are sure all of him knows – that carrying on like this is not good. Things will have to end one day, and there is no way it won’t hurt. But you don’t care about the future, you care about right now. You care about how he can’t help but groan, how you’re the only one who he fucks, how he clings to you for comfort just as much as you cling to him… Almost.

He thinks the others know about the two of you. You don’t care if they do or don’t. He thinks they’ve read into the way he touches you sometimes; the long lingering way he’ll hold onto you, the way you follow him around with a loyalty you show to no one else. You think you have read into those things as well.

You love him. He does not love you back, but he is kind. The kindness makes it easier to fall in love, but harder to be in love. You still would not trade it for anything. Kindness is in such short supply.

You wish the two of you could be anywhere but here, but you don’t, as well. You know there is not a place for you in the little store he talks about owning, where he sits watching the TV with his feet up. Your relationship will stay behind on this island when you leave, either in your civvies or in a casket, and a piece of you will always stay here with it. 

* * *

 The other soldiers are talking to each other or maybe talking to you, but they’re talking so fast and so loud that you can’t understand anything they’re saying. You have your head turned away from them, you’re watching him scream down the radio for CASEVAC. He is shaking. He finishes the call and puts the radio away, hands still trembling with fear or adrenaline.  

He comes back to you. You didn’t like that he was away. He kneels at your hand, and you want him to hold it, but he instead places the photograph in it. The implication that he carries this photograph of the two of you everywhere with him is too much to dissect. Right then, you just want him to put his arm around you the way he does in the photo. He doesn’t. 

* * *

 The phone is ringing. When you answer it, it gives you an address and a reason to be there. The reason is bullshit. You and the caller both know why you are going there. You say nothing and hang up the phone when the call is over. You have to choose a mask to take with you. You need the masks, in a way you can’t really describe. Not that you can put most things into words, these days. Things have fallen so far out of place; you stopped being a whole person a long time ago, and now you are resigned to just being shards of something that had been a man once. You are the masks now, and the phone calls. Parts of you exist in and outside of your body, in far away places. In places where the sun is hot, and the sands scald your skin. Places where the air is full of steam, and you are pressed against the wall. Places where you are dying under a canopy of leaves. The part of you that is in Miami picks up a mask. 

* * *

 You have a gun to the prisoner’s head. He walks out of the treeline and back into your vision and for a moment, you freeze, not pulling the trigger. He looks at you, briefly, and you feel relief that he has returned. For a second you don’t care about killing the prisoner. It doesn’t matter as much as him coming home. 

* * *

 He tells you there’s a something going on outside the store and he has to go. He hangs up on you. You haven’t been able to send him the photograph yet. You don’t know why it’s so hard for you to do things that you need to do, but basic tasks slip away from you with the same ease as forgetting dreams. You once again resolve to send him the photograph, but you know also you’re never going to get around to it. You wish he hadn’t hung up on you. You wish you’d talked to him about something other than your problems.

The two of you don’t talk on the phone as often as you used to. Maybe that’s for the best. When do you ever have anything to say? But you always miss him, as soon as you hang up. You miss more than can be expressed in conversation. Sometimes you wish he wasn’t so kind.

The news says they dropped a nuke.

You watch the news with blind incomprehension. The Russians dropped a nuke on San Francisco. No one could survive. The news reader starts crying. You do not cry. You watch the news and try to understand what’s happening, but the pieces won’t slide into place in your mind. You wish he hadn’t hung up the phone. Why did you talk so much about your ex when you just wanted to talk about him? The news reader says millions are dead. The number is too large for you to be able to fully understand. You want to pretend it isn’t happening, but you can’t. This moment is planting roots inside you, like weeds growing through the cracks in a sidewalk. 

* * *

 He’s come to visit you in Miami. He jokes about the heat when he arrives, sweating in the middle of a heatwave that you, as a native, have grown somewhat to expect. He is astonished by your car, which you bought with the last of your savings in a rash and definitely stupid move that you’re not allowing to haunt you. You love your car. He’s impressed by it, and his compliments put a burning spark of pride in your chest.

The two of you eat in a deli that you’re not familiar with, but you don’t want to take him to your usual haunts. You don’t want to have him transposed over your life here, like two ships colliding in the night. He probably notices that you’re new here, there’s no casual comfort to how you treat the store.

You thought it would be easy, being with him in person. You don’t like talking over the phone. But you find that the conversation dies in your throat without you saying anything at all. He does most of the talking, but there’s a definite unease to the way he looks at you. He talks like nothing is going on, but both of you know there’s something wrong with you. He’s looking at you with pity.

You don’t want to take him back to your apartment, but you have to. It’s a mess. You tried to clean it, but it was impossible. Things just seemed to keep mounting up however hard you tried to put it all away. You know he’s judging you when he walks inside, but he doesn’t say anything. Of course, he doesn’t, he’s far too kind, far too polite. Probably all he cares about right then is that his friend isn’t doing so well. You think he would be better off if he didn’t have to keep worrying about you, but you know he isn’t going to leave you behind. You both know he’s all you have.

It probably isn’t a good idea to kiss him, but you do. Both of you know it isn’t a good idea when he goes with you into the bedroom. It wasn’t a good idea the last time and it isn’t a good idea now, when you fuck on your unmade bed and put your arms around him and try to hold him close enough that he won’t inevitably slip out of your grasp and away from you. You have your knees pressed against his waist tight enough to bruise, fingernails digging into his back. You are trying desperately to leave a mark on him, to physically leave a reminder that you were there, with him. But you know these will fade, just as how the heat of his body on yours will fade, how you will wash away his sweat and cum from your skin, and the smell of him will be gone, ethereal and impossible to hold onto.

His body will be a blank canvas as soon as he leaves you, but yours never will. You’ll always have a scar on the back of your head that says someone once thought your life was worth saving.

He sits on the edge of the bed and you cry and he tells you it’s ok, but it isn’t. You don’t know why he keeps doing this. You love him, this voice of calm and reason that you always carry with you, but you don’t understand what he gets out of it. He never loved you, have has no need for you in his nice normal life. What reason could he have to keep clinging to you like this?

You can’t ask him, because if he thinks about it too much, he might cut you out of his life forever. Maybe he feels some kind of duty towards you; he saved your life, and now he cannot abandon you to fate, as though he made an investment and he has to make sure it pays out. You are his burden.

The two of you get drinks in a bar. You drink too much and throw up in the gutter. He pats you on the back and watches the sun setting over the skyline you drive through every day. The sky is lurid pink behind the waving branches of palm trees. 

* * *

 You roll the green ball from one hand to the other over the desk. It rumbles quietly as it goes, the almost imperceptible sound of rubber on paper. You have notes in front of you, but you haven’t said a word. Your court-appointed lawyer is doing all of the talking. He hates you; you have tracked the slowly growing spite behind his eyes as he comes in to see you day after day and grows more and more sure that your case is going nowhere. You don’t think he even believes your claims; maybe he did at some point hope there was a chance for you, but he has long since grown bitter in his apathy. He thinks you are a monster, you know that much. He hates your capacity for killing, sees something hideous in it. He has come close to saying this a dozen times, reading crime scene reports and rubbing finger and thumb on his eyes like he has a headache.

People protest outside the court every day. They are making a movie about you. These things are both meaningless to you. You roll the green ball from one hand to the other as your lawyer argues about phone records. Somewhere along the line you stopped being a human; you don’t know if it was when you put on the mask, or if it started when you became a political tool. People beg you for interviews, but you have nothing to say to anyone.

The ball rolls back and forth. It’s not really a game, but you play like it means something.

Whenever you go outside there are people and cameras and signs screaming in your face. More people love you now than have ever loved you in your life. It would be wrong to say that everything you did was done out of love. Everything you did was revenge. 

* * *

 You are meeting your new lieutenant for the first time. He arrived on a chopper that morning, was holed up talking to the commander for a few hours. You are resting a leg wound that has put you out of action for a day or two, so the others did not wake you when he arrived. Now you see him walking out of the commander’s cabin and walk to you with a hand outstretched to shake yours. He has short red hair and glasses, and smiles under a full beard. You shake his hand as the others make taunting but friendly jokes about you, the radio operator who never talks.

He doesn’t react to the jokes. He just says hello, greets you with enough genuine warmth that you feel immediately unsure of what he is doing here, in the middle of this dirty, angry war. Other leaders you have met have been loud, boisterous, filled with a confidence they rely on to survive in a world where you and everyone you know could die any day. The new lieutenant doesn’t need any of that. He seems reserved. Friendly. You think that you like him. 

* * *

 The photograph slips out of your hand. You make no move to stop it. It flies away on a low breeze, spirals out of sight. You will never see it again. You carried it with you everywhere. For a long time, you thought you would die with it in your pocket. You light a cigarette. You will never see his face again, but you already knew that. 

* * *

 Your fingers close around the photograph. You stare at his face, the sun making the glossy photograph reflect white over your own. You look at the perfect image of him as you bleed onto the Hawaii grass. You don’t look at him. You will both be going home soon. 

* * *

 The inside of your prison cell is four bare grey walls. You could not escape, but no one could escape what is coming now. Things were set in motion on a scale far grander than you could ever imagine; you and the man you love were only ever pawns on the board of a game you didn’t realise you were part of.

You haven’t thought about him in a long time. You don’t think about anything much these days. Sometimes you dream about him, smiling at you while you lie on gold sand in front of a turquoise sea, his hair glowing in the sunlight. Both there and now you have killed so many people, all in the name of someone else. It was all for revenge, but not your revenge. The revenge of men who move pieces all day without seeing the animals who die for them. Things could never have been different. Things will always be this way.

You hear a sound first. It was always going to come to this; in the end, what you did never mattered. You couldn’t have fought it even if you’d wanted to, and you didn’t want to. That was why they chose you to kill for them. They knew you were willing to do it. If you were given a second chance, you would do the same thing every time. It doesn’t matter if it was worth it or not. This is how things were always going to be.

The sound is so loud that it is nothing at all. The green ball rolls from your hand; you let it slip out of your fingers without trying to grasp onto it.

Ahead of you is a white and blinding light, the hope of freedom, a release from the dark world that the two of you have been travelling through. You are afraid, but calm, too. There is nothing you can do to stop this from coming, and you do not fight it. You do not consider if you want to live or die; it is out of your hands. He carries you onwards as the seconds drip away from the time you have left. It is all over, it was always going to end. One way or another.


End file.
